From one work to the next little dramas are revealed, showcasing domestic and urban scenes, populated mostly by strange characters and creatures. Each of these scenes seems an occasion to touch the \u00adspectator and to stir buried emotions. Lachapelle\u2019s miniatures, rather than attempting to show such unperfectible worlds as city development programs or interior designs, consist of revealing the troubling \u00adundercurrents of the everyday, thus belying the familiarity and playfulness of one\u2019s first impression on seeing the works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In L\u2019avanc\u00e9e<\/em> (2009), for instance, in a room whose quaintness is indicated by flowered wallpaper and outside walls of worn brick, a chair begins to move across the floor on its own. Electric lighting imparts the scene with a mood of mystery. Like other works in the same series, L\u2019avanc\u00e9e<\/em> was plunged in relative darkness at the time of its presentation in the exhibition En pure perte<\/em> (2009).1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - The exhibition was presented in 2009, at Galerie Art M\u00fbr (Montreal), which represents the artist.<\/span> This new component in Lachapelle\u2019s work becomes an intimate part of his pieces, amplifying their theatricality in this series. In prior work he used lighting indirectly, by way of the lighting systems in place at exhibition venues, playing on shadows cast around the sculptures. The quirky houses in his 2001 Structures de l\u2019invisible<\/em> series are illustrative, their open sides resting on precarious structures, lending them a skeletal appearance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In their simple, handcrafted construction, these miniatures, which are often made of wood, have something in common with the language of surrealism. The sculptures are presented as fa\u00e7ades, scaffolding, or ruins, which shadows complete and transfigure, revealing an otherwise invisible and unconscious reality. Lachapelle\u2019s little scenes also touch on the absurd, which becomes a rather tangible reference in the later series, Passages avides<\/em>, exhibited in 2004. The production hosts a menagerie of hybrid characters, like the rhinoceros-headed man in Rhino<\/em> (2004), or the character with a rabbit head; and there are animals, including squirrels, and a dog whose snout has been replaced by wood moulding. This strange collection of zoomorphic alter egos suggests a study of human behaviour and adversity. The titles themselves are more than suggestive: L\u2019aveu<\/em> (The Confession<\/em>), L\u2019impasse<\/em> (The Dead End<\/em>), La chute de l\u2019ange<\/em> (The Angel\u2019s Fall<\/em>), L\u2019\u0153il torve du prince<\/em> (The Prince\u2019s Menacing Eye<\/em>). The scenes are profoundly marked by a kind of desolation, their forlorn characters either sightless or fixed upon their predicament. The mood is cold and austere; indeed, even menacing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lachapelle\u2019s miniatures have something of the fable or children\u2019s tale, but turned into a nightmare. The narrative potential in the artist\u2019s production helps place this work in a perspective where the sculptures are not projections into the future so much as memories that are resurfacing and on which one must now cast a worried glance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This bridge with the past and its reformulation in the present through models is reconfirmed in the 2006 series, Man\u00e8ges<\/em>. These \u00adslender \u00adsculptures recall previous works by Lachapelle. Here again, though more than before, supporting structures become an integral part of the work. The prevailing theme in these new little worlds is that of fairs or amusement parks, featuring carousels, little wagons, and contraptions on rails. Yet these rides hardly seem to promise the thrills for which they are normally sought. The few figurines who approach them testify, rather, to the fragile human condition. Besides, the sections of fa\u00e7ade, the cornices, the mouldings, and other architectonic elements are visibly on the verge of being autonomous. In the near absence of human beings\u2009\u2014\u2009who\u2019ve likely fled, we\u2019re tempted to think\u2009\u2014\u2009one might believe they had a life of their own or were possessed by an evil genie. The impression is reinforced on observing the cockeyed nature of these obstinately and obviously peculiar structures. A merry-go-round, for instance, perched up high, can receive no one; rails go straight into the wall, are truncated at illogical places, small cars vainly line up along a cornice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Suggested trajectories through these miniatures are metaphors for journeys through the imagination and the unconscious. The smallness of the components makes possible this apprehension of otherwise ungraspable configurations (for it is hard to transpose such spaces). En pure perte<\/em> (2009), another series, focuses on scenes that test our rational approach to space and its uses. It is all the more striking here, as the little wagons and bumper cars of previous series have been replaced with urinals, posted along a roadside under street lights, grafted onto a tree, or attached to the platform of a merry-go-round. With this motif, Lachapelle preserves the idea of seating furniture, but steers its playful function toward the humdrum, perhaps even the repellent. Les passeurs<\/em> (2009) proposes a synthesis of these elements by marrying a merry-go-round with a columned gateway watched over by strange guards, hybrid animals who raise a part of the cornice to reveal a laden bookshelf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lachapelle focuses the reading on the doorway and the books. With this staging of books, knowledge in its various forms, along with fiction, appear to become tokens of openness and of access to other realities. Elsewhere, however, the motif of the book and, by extension, the library\u2009\u2014\u2009recurring motifs in Lachapelle\u2019s work\u2009\u2014\u2009is more ambivalent. In Antichambre<\/em> (2009), for instance, a character is perched atop a bookcase while motorized partitions activate and reconfigure themselves in the room around him. The openwork partitions alternately close in on him and move away, their position always uncertain. The books also seem at once to engage and to cancel out a field of possibilities while producing a sense of collapse.\u2009This impression is reinforced by the character\u2019s gesture of holding a book, while in fact empty-handed, and the replacement of his face with the fa\u00e7ade of a building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lachapelle\u2019s pieces resist one\u2019s effort to establish a clear typology of the spaces they represent, as these spaces tend to be mixed. Yet some stand out, allowing us to identify libraries, fairs, amusement parks, theatres. Thus, the spaces that captivate the artist, aside from their ability to figure the work of memory and emotion, recall those that Michel Foucault identified by the term heterotopia, spaces of otherness meant to receive our utopias.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Michel Foucault, \u201cDes espaces autres (1967),\u201d Dits et \u00e9crits<\/em>, tome IV (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1984), 752-62. Available in English (and in French) online, July 15, 2010, at http:\/\/foucault.info\/documents\/heteroTopia\/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (translated by Jay Miskowiec)<\/span> Among them, Foucault opposed libraries and fairs: the former were \u201cheterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time,\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> while remaining outside of time themselves; the latter, on the contrary, are connected with the fleeting, passing time of festivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2009, Lachapelle stopped using wood and polyester resin, with which he produced his models, in favour of computer-aided modelling. His production is now drawn from this virtual work and printed in 3D, enabling him to explore volumes and configurations in unique ways by pushing the spatio-temporal limits of the library. In Fissure<\/em> (2009), the library has become an infinitely and vertiginously malleable storage space of information, a problematization of spatiality that even the omniscient gaze overlooking the miniature now fails to grasp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [Translated from the French by Ron Ross]<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/70_DO04_Charron_GLachapelle_Les-passeurs-2-scaled.jpg\")
43 x 56 x 36 cm, 2009.
photo : Guy L’Heureux <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/70_DO04_Charron_GLachapelle_Lavancee-2-scaled.jpg\")
photo : Guy L\u2019Heureux<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nTroubling Fables<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/70_DO04_Charron_GLachapelle_lepiege.jpg\")
photo : Guillaume Lachapelle
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/70_DO04_Charron_GLachapelle_Antichambre-3-extra-scaled.jpg\")
photo : Guy L\u2019Heureux<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n